Beyond resumes: Job hunters need impressive LinkedIn profiles, too

"Today, we do LinkedIn profiles for 85% of our resume clients."
--Wendy Enelow

Lose your job recently? Overwhelmed by the prospect of having to
write a resume to impress prospective employers? Then you better take a
deep breath. Many recruiters and outplacement consultants say it's
become important for job hunters not only to create impressive resumes
but effective LinkedIn profiles as well.

According to Wendy
Enelow, executive director of the Resume Writing Academy and the
co-author of numerous books including Expert Resumes for Career
Changers, Expert Resumes for Managers and Executives, and Expert Resumes
for Engineers, "As recently as a year ago, we only did LinkedIn
profiles for a small percentage of clients who came to us to write their
resumes. Today, we do LinkedIn profiles for 85% of our resume clients.
It's essential today, whether someone is employed or not, to have a
professional profile on LinkedIn. In fact, I've been told by several
recruiters if a candidate isn't on LinkedIn, he or she doesn't exist."

Do you need to invest a lot
of time creating a LinkedIn profile if you've already completed your
resume? Can't you simply copy and paste the information from your resume
into your LinkedIn profile?

"Not exactly," said Enelow. "When you
write a resume, your goal is to write as lean and mean as you possibly
can. I've been writing resumes for over 30 years and increasingly,
brevity and conciseness are among the top priorities. These days,
whenever I'm writing a resume, I say to myself: Write tight, write lean,
and write clear. What might have been a six-line paragraph before is
now a three-line paragraph."

"On the other hand," she said, "a
LinkedIn profile enables you to elaborate and tell more of your career
story. For starters, you have room for a 2000 character summary in your
LinkedIn profile. And although you don't have to use all those
characters, you certainly have enough room for relevant accomplishment
summaries and educational credentials in that summary section."

Harvey
added, 'A resume that highlights someone's key strengths and selected
accomplishments transfers well to a LinkedIn profile. In fact, since
people often have only skeletal LinkedIn profiles when they first come
to us for outplacement, we encourage them to add information from the
summary on the first half of the first page of their resumes to their
LinkedIn profiles."

Brad Karsh, author of the Prentice Hall books
Confessions of a Recruiting Director and How to Say It on Your Resume,
agrees that there is an opportunity to write more in your LinkedIn
profile than your resume, but he cautions people not to get carried
away.

"If you're going to elaborate on anything in your LinkedIn
profile," he said, "spend more time on what's relevant to the jobs
you're applying for and on recent accomplishments."

By the way, in
case you're wondering, although Harvey, Karsh and Enelow all believe
LinkedIn profiles have become essential for job hunters, the same is not
true of Facebook.

"In fact," said Harvey, "when doing
outplacement with people, we encourage them to check their Facebook
pages and make sure there's nothing on them that would turn off
prospective employers or undermine their candidacy for jobs they might
consider pursuing."

What if you're currently employed? Is having a
LinkedIn profile a good or bad idea? What if your current employer
comes across your LinkedIn profile while checking LinkedIn for a
specific job applicant's profile? Would your employer worry that you're
looking for another job?

Karsh doesn't think so. Also founder and
president of Chicago-based career transition and management training
firm JobBound, Karsh said, "It's a natural thing to have a LinkedIn
profile these days so coming across yours shouldn't make your employer
worry that you're looking for another job. Some employers might actually
be concerned if they don't see someone's profile on LinkedIn."

Harvey
echoed that sentiment. "It wouldn't necessarily raise any suspicion by
your employer to find your profile on Linked In," he said. "In fact, if
you joined a group of professionals on LinkedIn related to your
profession or industry, your employer might benefit from the information
you learn by networking with those colleagues."